...Davin Risk, master food sculptor and photographer from Toronto, Canada, is the winner of the Mike Industries “Make a Meatspace Shuffle” creativity competition. Davin’s first entry, made entirely of goat butter, arrived only hours after the contest began and set the pace for a field of over 40 excellent “interpretations of iPod Shuffle as food“. Link.
Health24.com has a friendly reminder that DIY projects can get you hurt if you’re not careful (Ladders always make me nervous too)…many people underestimate the dangers in doing their own home repairs. In the UK alone, 70 people die per year while fixing their homes. Most of them fall off ladders…The largest single cause worldwide of DIY injuries, is falling off ladders. Power tools and electricity are also high up on the list. We’ve all been zapped, zorked and have had some close calls- be careful out there. Link.
Amazon has 10 pages of Volume 2 up. Go check’em out- Made on Earth “Report from the world of backyard technology ” Mousey the Junkbot “With a few spare parts, you can turn an old computer mouse into an amusing little robot” DIY home and Toolbox are also up there at the moment. Just a taste, subscribe or order the mag! Link.
It’s the weekend, it’s starting to warm up- and that means lawn care season is just about here. CocoonTech has a great thread about making your own sprinkler system. There are enough electronics, planning, schematics and parts to make this a fun project. If I had a yard, I think I’d hook the sprinklers in to a weather reporting system along with a local “do not water” notification system so they won’t turn on if there’s a water shortage. Link.
Clever chair, could be a cheap way to make lots of things… Compress and roll your oldest papers and assemble them following the easy construction method illustrated. No doubt that the structural design of this very cheap compressed paper stool will be strong enough to support one or two friends at tea time. Link.
This week 8 years ago, the humans lost the chess battle to Deep Blue. I netflixed “Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine” a great documentary on Kasparov’s Chess match with IBM (he lost, but they’ve yet to rematch) but noticed Netflix branded the DVD as well as watermarking the menu system. Is this a new way netflix will cut down on the “Netflix project” – an effort to copy of 25k DVDs. Or is Netflix Longtailing DVDs becomming a distributer for independent films? Photos of the DVD and menu here. IBM, how about open sourcing Deep Blue, it’s been 8 years. We’d love to do a DIY chess supercomputer for MAKE.
Might be neat to add this to an actual car PC…This custom mod gives your computer the personality of KITT, the computerized car from Knight Rider TV fame. It slides into a CD drive bay, and only has a single standard power connector. The project is a light display which imitates the dot in KITT’s hood. It looks like the scanning eye of the car’s computer that is so smart it has a personality and acts autonomously. Some people have said the computer shows more emotion and personality than the main actor, David Hasselhoff. Link.
Here’s an interesting way to add a LCD screen to your CPU case. This project uses a PSOne LCD. This Maker had a video card that supported video out, but it seems like it’s possible to wire in directly if your video card supports it. You could also power it from the computer itself. Link.
Kempa.com has a great overview of video on vinyl and the history of getting videos on all sorts of discs. In fact, there was a ‘format war’ of sorts that broke out amongst companies encoding video onto grooved discs, well before the VHS / Beta wars were waged. CED’s appear to have been the dominant iteration of this technology, though I’ve found reference to a number of similarly imagined formats, including VHD videodisc system, Magnavision/DiscoVision, phonovid and y.Link.
Wolfgang Puck is releasing self-heating coffee- can’t wait to pick one up and use it for some projects! It took a California company named OnTech seven years and $24 million to create the self-heating cans, which are activated by pushing a plastic button on the bottom. Water flows into a sealed inner cone filled with quicklime, which is mostly calcium oxide. A chemical reaction heats the coffee to a pleasant 145 degrees in six to eight minutes, the amount of time it might take to order, pay for and receive a latte from a barista.Link.
This fellow has a few cool projects, I like the TV Fish Tank- A friend of mine had a broken television, and for whatever reason, I decided I should make it into a fish tank. As a word of warning to anyone who may attempt something similar, this project has been a little difficult, mostly because I’ve never built a fish tank before, and it’s hard to get something that looks good and is also capable of holding 120 lbs of water. It’s easier if you use a smaller tv.Link.
Fireflies are networked nightlights for a local environment, the jars can be placed in different bedrooms or other spots around a home so people can communicate with one another through simply tapping on the jars. For example, if you tap the jar in your bedroom you will pulse the colored fireflies associated with that jar. The neighboring jars in your home will receive and pulse your taps, record them and then play them back. The neighboring jars can respond with their own tapping and broadcast themselves to the nightlights in the home. Pretty- here’s how to make them. Link.
...Davin Risk, master food sculptor and photographer from Toronto, Canada, is the winner of the Mike Industries “Make a Meatspace Shuffle” creativity competition. Davin’s first entry, made entirely of goat butter, arrived only hours after the contest began and set the pace for a field of over 40 excellent “interpretations of iPod Shuffle as food“. Link.
